Bringing High-Grade Experience to Rival Lab

Michael Anastasio stood before the employees of Los Alamos National Laboratory, his first all-hands meeting with the wary men and women who would soon be working for him. And he quickly made them laugh.

“I never in my life imagined that I would be standing here as the new director of Los Alamos,” said Anastasio, who has worked for 25 years at Los Alamos’ fellow -- and fiercely competitive -- nuclear weapons design center in Livermore, Calif. “And I bet you never imagined it either.”

A focused, disciplined man with a disarmingly laid-back style, Anastasio, who will take over as leader of Los Alamos in June, will be the first person ever to have led both the New Mexico facility and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

He also will be the first director of either who will answer to a management team that includes corporations alongside the University of California. UC has operated both labs on no-bid contracts for the federal government since they opened more than half a century ago.

He must bring stability and renewed focus to employees of Los Alamos, whose celebrated history as birthplace of the atomic bomb has been tarnished by repeated safety, security and fiscal problems.

The U.S. Department of Energy, which oversees the labs, announced in December that it was awarding the Los Alamos contract to a group headed by UC and Bechtel National, a division of engineering giant Bechtel Group. The decision ended a high-stakes battle that pitted the team against a group led by defense contractor Lockheed Martin and the University of Texas.

The announcement marked a face-saving finish for UC, whose management woes at Los Alamos had sparked scathing criticism in Congress and led to the Energy Department’s decision to pull the university’s exclusive contract. And it meant that Anastasio, who led the winning effort, would become the lab’s new director.

Anastasio takes the post at a pivotal moment for U.S. nuclear weapons policy, amid growing concerns about the safety and reliability of the nation’s aging nuclear stockpile and debate over whether new bombs are needed. Scientists at Los Alamos and Livermore are now competing in a feasibility study to design replacement warheads intended to be safer and easier to maintain than those in the existing stockpile.

In making the transition from Livermore to Los Alamos, Anastasio goes from a mile-square complex immediately adjacent to suburban Bay Area neighborhoods to a sprawling, isolated compound stretching across nearly 40 miles of New Mexico high desert.

The cultures and problem-solving approaches of the two labs also are different, employees say, with the scientists at Los Alamos organized largely within academic disciplines and Livermore taking a more interdisciplinary approach.

Los Alamos has nearly 12,000 staff and contract employees, an annual budget of more than $2 billion and a diverse mission that includes space science, climate research and biotechnology along with its weapons physics.

“It is a much more difficult place to manage than Livermore,” said Hugh Gusterson, an associate professor of anthropology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied the two labs. Los Alamos also has employee problems that are more ingrained, including low morale, Gusterson said. But many say Anastasio is the right choice, citing his consensus-building style and firsthand knowledge of the complex physics and engineering problems dealt with at the lab. The 57-year-old physicist and weapons designer has headed Livermore, near Oakland, since 2002.

Relatively unknown outside the insular world of nuclear weapons scientists, Anastasio is well-respected within it, as a physicist and a manager, those interviewed said. Livermore, although not trouble-free in recent years, is generally regarded as better-managed than Los Alamos.

“He has enormous credibility within the weapons complex,” said Tyler Przybylek, a senior Energy Department administrator who played a key role in evaluating the competing teams’ proposals and has known Anastasio for many years.

“He also brings a certain style.... He’s very much a roll-up-your-sleeves kind of person and someone who will spend a lot of time with people, trying to understand their issues -- not just science and engineering but the personal issues too.”

Przybylek said he could not comment on whether Anastasio’s leading role tipped the scales in favor of the UC-Bechtel partnership. But others did.

“We think he was just a huge element of the win,” said Gerald L. Parsky, chairman of UC’s Board of Regents and chairman of the board of the new company formed to run Los Alamos. “He is a unique combination of someone who is extremely gifted in the sciences and who understands what it will take to create this new structure.”

Supporters say he is well-suited for his new role. A native of Washington, D.C., Anastasio has spent his career in the bomb business.

After receiving his bachelor’s degree in physics from Johns Hopkins University and a master’s and PhD in theoretical nuclear physics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, he arrived at Livermore in 1980.

Working in the lab’s weapons divisions, he helped design several additions to the current stockpile, then began his rise through the management ranks.

As head of Livermore’s nuclear weapons programs in the 1990s, he played a central role in helping the Energy Department develop its stockpile stewardship program and resolving the technical dilemma at its heart: how to ensure, without carrying out nuclear tests, that the bombs would work when needed.

“Mike was in the middle of a small group of people who thought about that problem and figured out how to solve it,” said Bruce Goodwin, Livermore’s current weapons chief. Anastasio was then among a handful of Los Alamos and Livermore scientists who helped convince the nation’s military and political leaders that weapons could still be assessed even if the U.S. signed a nuclear test ban.

Goodwin said that at one particularly intense point in the discussions, Gen. John Shalikashvili, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “just turned to Mike and said, ‘Will this work?’ And Mike said, ‘Yes, it will, and here’s why.’ ”

Anastasio downplays the significance of the part he played in the conversations leading to the 1995 test ban, but he said he was honored to be able to advise policymakers on a decision so important to national security.

According to several of those present, his role also was crucial during an arduous, daylong oral examination of his team last August as part of its effort to win the Los Alamos contract.

Sitting around a U-shaped table in an Albuquerque conference room, the UC-Bechtel team of scientists, engineers and operations experts fielded questions from Energy Department officials about science and technology, lab operations and business practices.

But the final question, involving leadership of the troubled lab, had to be answered by Anastasio alone. As those in the room watched -- “looking fascinated,” Anastasio later said, laughing -- he spent 90 minutes preparing and delivering his answer.

“It’s fair to say ... he did very well,” said Przybylek, a former general counsel of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the labs for the Energy Department.

Anastasio is still trying to wrap up his duties in Livermore but spends most of his time in New Mexico. As he prepares for his new job, Anastasio says it is the human, not technical, aspects that demand his attention most.

In a recent interview at his transition team headquarters here, Anastasio said his top priorities are listening and trying to reassure employees unsettled by the years of high-profile security and fiscal problems, and then months of uncertainty during the contract competition.

“We’re trying to build toward the future ... and the laboratory’s people are the most important part of that,” Anastasio said as he took a break from back-to-back meetings in his office across from the lab. “Given the experience this laboratory has been through in the last years, we’re trying to communicate with them at many levels and in many ways.”

He also is devoting significant time to the details of benefit and retirement plans, a top concern for employees nervous about the transition from UC management and possible effects on their pensions.

Those worries were evident during a recent community meeting in Los Alamos, one in a series of get-acquainted gatherings with the new director. Many in the audience of about 60 in a high school auditorium turned out to be current or former lab employees. “On the pension, how do we find out what our fate is?” a white-haired man asked, sounding exasperated. “And does anyone care?”

“Of course people care,” Anastasio replied. “I don’t know the specific answer to your question, but we’ll get you an answer.”

After the meeting, several of those present said they were favorably impressed. “He seems to be very candid, honest and believable,” said Richard Browning, 63, a mechanical engineer who retired last year. “And that’s a lot better than what we’ve had.”